Bone in the Throat (10 page)

Nineteen

T
HE CHEF TOOK
the elevator down and walked out into the afternoon sun, soca music fading away behind him.

Across the street were a row of benches set alongside a small triangular park where office workers and students on lunch break sat munching Sabrett hot dogs or eating salads from plastic deli containers. Old men fed pigeons; a few of them, homeless, bare-chested, their shirts balled up as pillows, slept in the hot sun. The chef sat down, his legs tormenting him. He held his face in his hands and started to cry.

There was a voice behind him. "Hot sixty, hot sixty, got a hot sixty right here."

It was a skeletal black man with long, purple tracks on his neck. He had the pupilless cartoon bunny
eyes
and Popeye arms of a long-term junkie. He wore dirty gray sweatpants, loose at the hips, with his underpants pulled up near his navel. He didn't have a shirt. His filthy toes poked through holes in his high-top sneakers.

"What?" asked the chef.

"Hot sixty, B. Sixty milligrams, still warm," said the man. He held up a small screw-top bottle with orange liquid inside.

"How much?" asked the chef.

"Thirty dollar," said the man, putting the bottle back in a crumpled brown paper bag.

"I don't have it," said the chef dejectedly. "I just don't have it."

The man continued down the row of benches. "Hot sixty. Hot sixty."

The chef bent over and retrieved a twenty-dollar bill from inside his sock. He folded it up and held it tightly in his fist. His aching legs carried him east.

At Third Street, he crossed Avenue A, then B, then C. He heard the distant shout of "Open! Toilet's open!" A man holding a can waved at him and said "Green light. Got it good." He continued walking. A voice on a rooftop cried out,
"Feo! Feo!"
Someone asked him "Whassup, whassup?" "Yo, Flaco! Hey, Flaco!" He kept walking.

He passed a restless line of customers jostling each other outside a burned-out tenement. A heavily muscled Dominican holding a baseball bat was yelling, "Have your money out the long way. No singles. No talking on the line. Have your money ready."

Across the street, more junkies were lined up in an abandoned lot. Overhead, a rusting paint bucket on a string descended from a third-floor apartment. The bucket went down with the dope, was pulled back up again with the next customer's money. Each time the bucket descended, the customer at the head of the line would reach in, remove the dope, and then hurry away.

There was a cry of
"Bajando!"
from a rooftop. The bucket was pulled up and disappeared inside the apartment. The lines of junkies broke apart into ragged little groups making wide circles on the sidewalk, trying to look casual while they waited for the police to pass. The Dominican with the bat was saying, "Keep moving, keep moving," and waving people away from his stoop. A police cruiser turned the corner and rolled by, a sleepy blond policeman in the passenger seat looking over the chef without interest. When it turned the corner at the end of the block, the junkies instantly regrouped.

Just before Avenue D, an old man with a handful of stolen belts approached the chef and offered syringes. "Works, a dollar. Brand-new Blue-Tip works." From across the street, other voices: A woman called out from a doorway, someone cried, "Laredo's open," another voice offered "Try-It-Again," another, "Red Tape." The chef ignored them. Next to an abandoned public school, he approached the alcove of a five-story apartment building. A pudgy, Indian-looking woman with a black eye peered at him through the smudged glass of the dented front door. She opened the door a crack and said, "Show me some ID."

The chef rolled up his left sleeve and showed her the bruise on his left arm.

"Don't look like nothin'," she said.

"I been here a million times," whined the chef.

"Wait a minute," said the woman. "Marcial!" she cried.

A thick-chested man wearing a Toltec face mask stepped into the alcove and opened the outer door.

"You know this guy?" asked the woman.

"What do you want?" the man asked the chef.

"Manteca," said the chef. "I want some D."

"You know him?" the woman asked again.

The man looked the chef over carefully. "I seen him before." He let the chef inside the alcove and opened the inner door, using a key from a crowded key chain on his hip. He led the chef down a hallway and up two flights of stairs littered with crack bottles, used syringes, and discarded condoms.

"Got it good today, B," said the man. "You want express? Five dollars. There's a line up there."

The chef shook his head, "No thanks."

On the second floor, they turned left. The man used another key on a steel-reinforced door with an enlarged peephole. Inside was an unfurnished apartment. They passed through a living area strewn with more crack bottles, bottle caps, candy wrappers, and condoms. There was a filthy kitchenette piled with food-encrusted dishes and empty take-out containers. A small religious icon stood on top of a nonworking refrigerator. At the rear of the kitchenette, a man-size hole had been bashed through the raw brick wall into the abandoned public school next door. The man took a flashlight out of the refrigerator and played the light around in the dark beyond the hole. "You know how to get up there?" he asked. The chef nodded and clambered quickly through the hole.

It was pitch black inside. It was cooler, and it smelled of piss and burning candles. It was damp, rain had come through the roof, and the chef had to step carefully in the dark, feeling with his toes for the lengths of plywood laid across the crossbeams in the ankle-deep black water, afraid the floor would give way and he'd fall through. A line of flickering votive candles placed every few yards lit the path. The chef picked his way through the dark, stepping on spongy bits of water-logged cardboard, the plywood pathway frequently sinking below the water. He turned a corner and heard people speaking Spanish. He had to climb through another hole, which was cut through sheetrock, and into another hall. A man loomed up in front of him, pushed a flashlight in his face. He held a Tec-9 pistol in the other hand and waved with it, directing the chef into a bombed-out classroom.

There was light in this room. It streamed through two shattered and paneless windows that looked down over an empty lot. The ceiling was water-damaged and sagged dangerously, wires hanging from the crumbling wet plaster above. More than thirty junkies stood restless and uncomfortable in small groups, waiting silently to be ushered elsewhere by the man with the pistol.

A short blond hooker with thinning hair wearing a tight bustier and tighter cut-offs stood in front of the chef. "Are they serving?" he whispered to her. She turned around and whispered, "Yeah, they just opened it up again," showing the chef a glimpse of rotted teeth.

"Shut up in there!" yelled the man with the pistol from the hall.

The chef could see the occasional figure moving past the doorway in the hall, heading back to the street. The man with the pistol stepped into the holding room and directed another small group into a hallway to the right. As the chef moved closer, he could make out another group of dark figures lined up in a stairwell. Every few seconds, another dark silhouette, moving quickly, would hurry down the stairs and past the doorway, transaction completed. He could hear them stumbling and sloshing through the water on their way back to the street.

Finally the chef's small group was called. The line closed up, more junkies wandering in to take their place. The chef's group walked up the steps single file. "Watch the third step," said the man with the pistol. He shined a light on the missing step; inside the hollow space was a piece of plywood booby-trapped with razor blades and nails. The line moved up the steps at short intervals. At the top, the chef could make out a jerry-built barrier, lit from behind by a single burning candle. The hooker in front of him approached the barrier. The chef saw it was covered by a blanket. She whispered, "Gimme a deck," in the dark. The blanket moved a bit.

Behind it, he could see a cage built of chicken wire, corrugated steel, roofing material, and pieces of wood planking. A hand extended out from behind the blanket and took the hooker's money and reemerged holding a bundle of glassine bags held together by a rubber band. She turned and stumbled back down the stairs on high heels.

The chef stepped up to the barrier. A whispered voice from behind it said,
"Cuánto?"
He answered,
"Dame dos grandes,"
and handed over his twenty-dollar bill. The hand reappeared holding two bags with EXECUTIVE stamped on them in smeared black ink. The man behind him on line growled, "Step off, chump," menacingly, and the chef had only a second to glimpse the two hunched, dark figures in the flickering candlelight behind the blanket before the blanket fell and he had to hurry down the steps.

He had just reached the last step, just outside the holding area, when he heard shouting below. From the roof came cries of
"Bajando!
Red light!
Bajando!"
There was the sound of the door to
some
secret escape hatch being opened as the two workers in the cage gathered up the drugs and the money; there was another sharper sound as the hatch shut behind them and they slipped into the dark bowels of the building. Suddenly panicked junkies were running in every direction. Frantic figures, looking for hiding places or a way to escape, pushed past him, banging into walls in the dark. He ran toward the only light, the holding room. People were clambering out the windows, jumping down a story into the trash-strewn lot. The chef saw blue uniforms down there standing over the prone figures of hapless junkies, putting on handcuffs, kicking legs apart.

The chef could hear them coming, the sound of their squawking radios getting louder and louder. Outside the holding room, he could see their flashlights moving toward him, reflecting off the water and through the holes in the crumbling plasterboard. One raggedy-looking man with his arm in a cast crawled under a rusting box spring to hide. Another struggled desperately to pull up a rotting floorboard, then disappeared down into the hole. A small, emaciated-looking man with an Orioles cap pushed past the chef and slipped whimpering into the narrow space behind the plasterboard in the wall. Without thinking, the chef squeezed in after him. He caught a last glimpse of the man's eyes, frightened and rodentlike, before he was swallowed up by the dark. He edged after him, sideways, splinters penetrating his shirt and tearing at his hands. In seconds, the cops were in the room.

"Come on outta there, dirt-bag!" he heard one yell. "Hands over your head! HANDS OVER YOUR HEAD MOTHERFUCKER I BLOW YOUR FUCKIN' HEAD OFF! GET DOWN ON THE FLOOR! GET DOWN ONNA FLOOR! ARMS AND LEGS SPREAD!!"

He heard them pull back the box spring and pull the man with the cast out from beneath it. He heard them call to the man in the floor, chuckling at first, then angry; shouts and threats as they had to go in after him. He could hear, "I'm stuck! I'm stuck inna pipes." There was a crash as the man was pulled free and dropped onto the floor. Then the clicking of handcuffs.

"Anybody else?" asked a policeman.

"I didn't see anybody," said another.

"Check back there," said another. "These guys are like fuckin' cock-a-roaches.'

Lights danced briefly through the tiny holes in the plaster in front of the chef. He shifted his weight slowly in the dark, trying not to breathe. The light moved away tor a moment. The man with the Orioles cap twitched. The chef could feel the man's leg pressed up against him as the little man struggled silently to brace himself. The chef remained motionless. He felt something wet and warm on his leg and realized the little man had pissed in his pants.

"Anybody in there, come on out," said a policeman. An arm, reaching into the narrow entrance with a flashlight, scraped blindly around inside the wall for a few long seconds, knocking paint chips and plaster onto the floor, then moved away.

"Anybody in there?" asked a voice.

"Fuck if I know,' another voice responded. "I can't fuckin' fit in there. I can't get my head around."

"Fuck it," said the other "Let the rats have 'em, anybody in there. You wanna try it, hotshot?"

"I sure ain't squeezin in there," said another voice.

"Anybody else up here?" said a new, more authoritative voice.

Somebody banged a nightstick against the wall a few times. More plaster dust fell in the chef's hair. Another voice, coming from the opening to the wall, said, "I think there's somebody in there. I can see something."

The flashlight reappeared again, banging around at the end of an arm in the narrow entrance.

"What is it?" asked a voice.

The chef held his breath.

"I don't know, I think there's somebody in there. I can see clothes or something," said the nearest voice.

"Can you get to it?"

"No. Maybe run down to the car get a sledgehammer, we can find out for sure," said the cop.

"Fuck that, I'm not humpin' all the way down the car and back up again in this shit."

"Call on the radio," suggested another voice.

"Fuck it, we got enough. It's prolly just garbage. These animals put the garbage in the fuckin' walls."

"We got enough."

"Let's go then. We all done here?" said the authoritative voice.

"We got these two," said another voice.

The radios began to squawk again. The chef could hear the junkies being bundled off by the cops. There were muttered curses as the cops stumbled and slogged off into the distance, their radios getting fainter and fainter.

After a few minutes, there was no more sound from the holding room on the other side of the wall. The chef felt the little man next to him squirming around, trying to push his way out.

"C'mon, man," said the little man. "I wanna get out. I pissed in my fuckin' pants."

"Sssssh," said the chef, still listening for police.

"They gone, B," said the little man.